Imaged and Imagined North Korean Materialities: Changing Architecture, Cartography, Landscape, and Places

Abstract

North Korea’s future is marked by possibilities and presumptions. Much analysis of the Pyongyang and North Korea to come focuses on future relationships with the South, political vacuums, population displacements, security threats and hypotheticals; few questions are asked of the nation’s current materialities. Rather than theoretical or conceptual, future North Korean landscapes will be complex physical co-productions of past, present and future, generating new terrains. How might we imagine such spaces and places characterized by the coexistence of the realistic and surrealistic, mundane and heroic, certain and contingent? This panel explores architectural, design, cartographic and topographic exercises in bringing North Korean materialities into the present, seeing across, through and beyond them and constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing them in theoretically considered but imaginative futures. Using the tools of architecture, engineering, cartography, futurology and human geography, this panel aims to produce new ways of imaging and imagining North Korean landscapes. Robert Winstanley-Chesters first considers North Korean spaces and places of memorial as lively active materialities; Xiaoxuan Lu and Bo Wang suggest analyzing water as an urbanizing agent at intersections of the material and cultural, acting upon the Tumen river region bordering China, North Korea and Russia; Dongsei Kim examines four spatial examples to illustrate how spatial fissures of the border between North and South Korea become a stage and a proving ground for thawing inter-Korean relationships; Finally Dongwoo Yim reviews Pyongyang’s socio-economic change through its physical transformations and foresees development paths that may occur with expansion of market-oriented economy in the city.